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The Conduit
The Conduit is the single most important thing in the entirety of The Realms. I'd rather see Sol destroyed in its entirety than allow it to be damaged." - Anton the Heretic (2551 SE) "Every trace of the Conduit and its devils must be purged from Sol! Until no trace of it remains, we will never know safety!" - From the inauguration speech of the High Chancellor of Sol, Adrian Veltan (Y.2552(SE)) The simplest description of the Conduit is a series of vast energy pathways in Otherspace connecting every settled star system in The Realms. Its original purpose was to allow instantaneous interstellar communication, but after the Vector Catastrophe in 20 SE, it began to evolve into its current form. Its existence allows for FTL travel, magic, the Gods, and the Outer Realms. Early History and Construction Colonization ships had been leaving Earth for close to 100 years without any form of FTL communication. This made diplomacy and trade between systems almost impossible. In -45 FiE, a method was discovered the would allow space-time to be bent in a desired direction, rather than in a radius around the source. Unfortunately, the amount of energy required to create a bend of any significant distance would collapse the system into a black hole. Besides a few scientific studies, the idea had no practical use for many decades until the discovery of Otherspace in -15 FiE. One of the major ways in which Otherspace differed from realspace is that no matter how much matter or energy was in an area, it wou ld never collapse into a black hole. While initially seen as absurd, by -13 FiE, the existence of Otherspace had been proven and several methods were being tested to send and receive energy from Otherspace as well as manipulating any energy sent over. It was also discovered that it was possible to manipulate realspace through the manipulation of Otherspace. By bending Otherspace through the use of vast amounts of energy, it would be possible bend realspace between systems. The possibility of FTL communication was massive and vast sums of money were invested into designing and developing the system. By -5 FiE, the first Conduit Node had been constructed on Earth and STL messages were sent to Vector, Deltan, and Eden with instructions on how to build matching systems on their worlds. On 25.13,1(FiE), the Conduit Node on Vector finished construction and on Y.0(SE), it made contact with Earth's node and sent the first known FTL message. When the CGC was established, this date would be set as the beginning of the second era. These early nodes were very simple, being capable of only about 1 bit per second. The systems were very basic, only being to create a tunnel the width of a few atoms. While systems could be directly connected, the energy required made it prohibitively expensive and for many years, for non-essential messages, smaller amounts of energy would be used that would only bend space a certain distance, shortening message travel time from years to much more manageable months. By 10 SE, both Deltan and Eden had working nodes established. Several nodes had been constructed on Earth, allowing for simultaneous communication with multiple other systems. The technology advanced rapidly until around 20 SE. At this point speeds were up to several petabytes per second per node, and advanced data compression methods meant that this limit rarely was an issue. New energy manipulation techniques had also driven down the costs, although they were still far too expensive for the average citizen to use often. While rates still increased and costs still dropped after this point, the speed at which it occurred was slower. The width of the tunnels, however, were still only able to be made around the size of 10 hydrogen atoms, making it impossible for anything other than electrons and (very carefully aimed) single atoms to be sent through. This system revolutionized the colonization process and by 15 SE, 20 more colonization ships had been launched, each with their own node onboard. FTL travel had not yet been invented, meaning that while these ships could talk to Earth instantaneously, they were still limited to travelling at the speed of light. The Structure of the Conduit Conduit Nodes